The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know

By David Wolman
02.25.08

On the outskirts of Montreal sits a brick monolith, the Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies. Once one of Canada's most notorious asylums, it now has a small number of resident psychiatric patients, but most of the space has been converted into clinics and research facilities.

One of the leading researchers here is Laurent Mottron, 55, a psychiatrist specializing in autism. Mottron, who grew up in postwar France, had a tough childhood. His family had a history of schizophrenia and Tourette syndrome, and he probably has what today would be diagnosed as attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. Naturally, he went into psychiatry. By the early '80s, Mottron was doing clinical work at a school in Tours that catered to children with sensory impairment, including autism. "The view then," Mottron says, "was that these children could be reeled back to normalcy with play therapy and work on the parents' relationships" — a gentle way of saying that the parents, especially the mother, were to blame. (The theory that emotionally distant "refrigerator mothers" caused autism had by then been rejected in the US, but in France and many other countries, the view lingered.)

After only a few weeks on the job, Mottron decided the theories were crap. "These children were just of another kind," he says. "You couldn't turn someone autistic or make someone not autistic. It was hardwired." In 1986, Mottron began working with an autistic man who would later become known in the scientific literature as "E.C." A draftsman who specialized in mechanical drawings, E.C. had incredible savant skills in 3-D drawing. He could rotate objects in his mind and make technical drawings without the need for a single revision. After two years of working with E.C., Mottron made his second breakthrough — not about autistics this time but about the rest of us: People with standard-issue brains — so-called neurotypicals — don't have the perceptual abilities to do what E.C. could do. "It's just inconsistent with how our brains work," Mottron says.

From that day forward, he decided to challenge the disease model underlying most autism research. "I wanted to go as far as I could to show that their perception — their brains — are totally different." Not damaged. Not dysfunctional. Just different.

By the mid-1990s, Mottron was a faculty member at the University of Montreal, where he began publishing papers on "atypicalities of perception" in autistic subjects. When performing certain mental tasks — especially when tapping visual, spatial, and auditory functions — autistics have shown superior performance compared with neurotypicals. Call it the upside of autism. Dozens of studies — Mottron's and others — have demonstrated that people with autism spectrum disorder have a number of strengths: a higher prevalence of perfect pitch, enhanced ability with 3-D drawing and pattern recognition, more accurate graphic recall, and various superior memory skills.

Yet most scientists who come across these skills classify them as "anomalous peaks of ability," set them aside, and return to the questions that drive most research: What's wrong with the autistic brain? Can we find the genes responsible so that we can someday cure it? Is there a unifying theory of autism? With severe autistics, cognitive strengths are even more apt to be overlooked because these individuals have such obvious deficits and are so hard to test. People like Baggs don't speak, others may run out of the room, and still others might not be able to hold a pencil. And besides, if 75 percent of them are mentally retarded, well, why bother?

Mottron draws a parallel with homosexuality. Until 1974, psychiatry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, described being gay as a mental illness. Someday, Mottron says, we'll look back on today's ideas about autism with the same sense of shame that we now feel when talking about psychology's pre-1974 views on sexuality. "We want to break the idea that autism should definitely be suppressed," he says.